Oh- one other thought. I don't know how long you store all the stuff
we've emailed to the list, but would reducing the storage need by
deleting anything older than some specified amount of time help??

Theresa

Theresa W. wrote:

Hi Chris-
Well- I'm glad you are letting us know there are issues and kind of
wish you'd told us earlier. While donations won't fix the problem, I
rather feel like donations are the least we can do the help reimburse
the $2K you've "donated". For the long term, I think what ever is the
easier, and least financially burdensome should be the choice. You'll
know these things alot better than any of us. We certainly all can
live easily with slower post times, etc. Also, we can work on sending
individual messages/greetings, and some of the really Off Topic
issues/opinions off-list to help save bandwidth. Any other
suggestions of what WE all can do to help??

Theresa

Christopher P. Lindsey wrote:

Hi guys,

I think I'm going to move hort.net to an offsite ISP in the coming
months.
As you know, I lost Heronswood as a customer this spring, so that
took
away about $3500 in income. I now have another customer that pays
$2400/year that I have good reason to believe will go away, so that's
going to leave me in a big financial hole. As it is, I've paid $2000
out-of-pocket this year to keep the site running, but with a monthly
bill of $600 for the Internet connection it's going to keep getting
worse.

I've been looking at colocation options where I can host a server
on another network for about $200/month. They'll manage the
hardware for
me, but I'll be responsible for my own software installation and
stuff. I'll also probably drop many of the sites that I've been
hosting, so the main server use will just be for hort.net. Google
ads will pay for most of the cost and I've been doing some freelance
programming for the American Iris Society that will hopefully cover
the rest.

There shouldn't be anything different service-wise and hopefully
the site will be a lot faster. The downside is that I lose a lot of
control over the network and system configurations and we're limited
to only one server, so if the processing speed isn't enough we're
out of luck. It may also turn out that this isn't feasible because
our site uses to much bandwidth and disk space.

If anyone has any ideas or comments, please let me know or share them
with the list.

Thanks,

Chris

P.S. I don't want to hear talk of donations and stuff. :) Although
appreciated, it would just be a temporary fix. We either need
more (self-sufficient) customers, a sponsor to pay for the site,
or some other plan.

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